Dave Chesson Kindleprenuer Founder Interview • The Road to Riches

Zach: Hi guys! Zach Miller here again today and as you know I’ve been going through interviewing basically the most successful people online, people of expertise that are outside my expertise which as you guys know, am a great guy sales funnels probably you know one of the best but when it comes to anything else I’m honest, I suck. So, I’m here to bring to you the absolute best cutting edge, when it comes to Kindle book marketing especially on Amazon you guys know how powerful that is especially for your free plus shipping offers any books any authors out there listening, you understand that Amazon is the go to to become successful online and with me today I have the owner, the founder and the creator of Kindleprenuer KDP rocket, it is the largest bookmarking website online right now, he is a consultant to NY Times bestselling authors in both the fiction and non-fiction genre so if you can wrap your head around that this guy has a lot under his belt. Not only that, he’s worked personally with Pat Flynn. So, all right without much further ado you guys I’m going to show him to you’ll here we have him Dave Chesson. How you doing Dave?

Dave: Hey guys! How’s it going?

Zach: So before we really get too deep into it for those of the people that don’t really know maybe they don’t quite understand what Kindle is, what do you do and want you to explain a little bit about that for the audience.

Dave: Well sure, you know back in two thousand and seven Amazon did something that was a major game changer to publishing. Before this, OK before two thousand and seven we had to be phenomenal writers and somehow convince an agent to represent us and then that agent had to convince some publisher to pick it, up then after that you would have to sign contracts and then maybe your book would actually show up but if you couldn’t do those things you could never publish like that’s it you’re done your dream of writing a book and have a fall into the hands of people was over. Well in two thousand and seven Amazon said whoa let’s just let’s just cut out that middleman here and let’s allow people to sell publish their books write on the world’s largest book market Amazon dot com (amazon.com) and they created this thing called “Kindle Direct publishing” (KDP) where now anybody can take a book format it and put it right up on Amazon and get it in front of hungry shoppers so right there it allows normal people like you and me to be able to sit down and write the book that’s on our heart and actually get it out there.

Zach: Wow that’s amazing so just the ability to go from someone who has a great idea to now I can actually make money off that I can be the author I’ve always been dreaming about I know a lot of our audience that are listening even now I’ve probably been sitting in there waiting for years just thinking I’ve got this great idea I want to write it down how the heck am I going to make any money off of it and this is exactly how right?

Dave: Exactly and to tell you the truth there are three different reasons why anybody out there should consider publishing a book on Amazon. Number one is like you said somebody has a dream we we all had that moment in our lives when we were like Man I I got the site you know idea in my head I just want to get it out there or you know I have a story a personal story that I know people would heal by just hearing it and that’s one, the second one is that you know you’ve got millions of shoppers on Amazon looking for their next fix when it comes to reading they’re willing to pay for it and so that’s another way to monetize your ideas if you have this great blog or you have content that people love you can turn that into a book reach a whole new market and make more money, and the third one which this is the big favorite and maybe you weren’t number one in two but I’ll bet you got number three here and that’s to become a best seller. So maybe you have a business, maybe you’re a lawyer maybe you’re you know a side hustling dad or something like that but the fact of the matter is is that to be able to state on your resume, on your application or just on your business card ‘bestselling author’ that’s huge and thanks to Amazon it’s a lot easier than you think.

Just to give you kind of a quick story to show how much this can do for you, I was working with a lawyer up in Seattle once and we came together we put together kind of like the quintessential book on DUI. So you know, say for example somebody gets a DUI the first thing they think is ‘oh my god what do I do’ you know like it seems like this crazy circus now and then my life sucks, so he put together this book we were able to quickly get it to a best seller and it’s category and now out of all the other lawyers that deal with DUIs in Seattle or in that state from that matter, he’s the only one that’s able to say well yeah but I’m also a bestselling author on DUIs, right? Everybody else is saying why I went to Cornell I would assume such and such and he’s like yeah I went there too but here’s here’s my calling card aka my book you can have that for free, how many customers do you think he is converting over the other guys that don’t have that. So again there’s just such an opportunity right there to really set yourself apart and it’s not that hard thanks to the Amazon platform.

Zach: Awesome so now that they really understand that they have that leverage ability in this day and age, if you were to start off with kind of day one you know people don’t really understand your journey quite yet they they know that you’ve done a lot you’ve worked with a lot of people but if you were starting over from day one what would be those starting foundation movements?

Dave: Well, there’s two types of marketing when it comes to book marketing right, the first is you find out what readers want and you write that book. The phrase has been coined to say ‘write to market’ right? Amazon has a certain market that’s there, it’s a quantifiable number. There are a lot of people that are looking for this type of book and they can’t find it all right, we can go into Amazon and figure out what that is that they want that they can’t find, what is it that they’re so hungry for that they’ll buy anything that comes out, we can write those books OK! That’s a wonderful tactic especially for a new author who doesn’t have a giant following a huge e-mail list or you know mad Facebook ad skills or something like that, right? This is being discovered on the market by writing what the market wants, the other way though is kind of what I learned to you just just now which is you have the ability to find a market somewhere and bring them to the book you wrote. So, you know when I was working with Pat Flynn right the fact is the guy has I’m sure he has over one hundred thousand e-mail subscribers right, he has the ability to send one e-mail to one hundred thousand people that loved his content and can convince them to go to his book, he could write a book about just putting you know his pant legs on one leg at a time and still buy them I’m sure you would too because it’s Pat Flynn right, so but he has that ability some of my some of my buddies who are huge Facebook ads guys they can probably write just a book about you know just Facebook as in general use Facebook ads and drive sales to it. So to recap on that, it’s either finding out what the market wants and providing for that or having a skill or asset that allows you to grab the market from somewhere else and bring them to your book.

Zach: And when it comes to a tool to be able to quantify this I’m really stuck on this I know a lot of my audience are the exact same way you said ‘quantify it’ {Interject: Yes} how do you do that?

Dave: Well let me give you kind of like for those out there that want to understand a market, let me give you the kind of the free way of doing this OK. the first thing is that you need to understand what words people type in Amazon, OK! What are the words they’re using when they’re searching for the next book, if you what you think the words are don’t exist then it means that we psyching it in, so now you know OK I just need down way too much right or I just don’t know what the market wants to do this to go into Amazon and start typing in your idea and Amazon will auto suggest it’s a box that pops down and tries to fill in the blank. It’s using this to basically say hey we’ve seen a lot of people type this in before maybe that’s what you’re trying to type OK and a little super awesome hat for you guys out there highly recommend that if you do that, use Chrome In Cognito mode OK, Just right click on the icon and clicking ‘cognito’. The reason being is that if you’re hacked in the Amazon or you’ve ever used Amazon before in your entire life, Amazon puts cookies on your computer and they’re tracking what you’re doing and the searchers looks will be different based off your shopping habits, so going cognito mode so it can’t use that information and it gives you the specifics, so now you can kind of see some of the phrases you don’t know which one is more popular but at least you have an idea, you can also look at the books that then show up for that idea if you click on a book scroll down and you’ll see something called an Amazon best seller rank ‘absr’ that’s a number from one to four point seven million with one being the bestselling book in all of Amazon a four point seven Billion like total trash. So there’s a number in there and it tells you how well it’s doing and we have a calculator on can opener dot com Just type in like K. D. P. calculator into Google it’ll come up number one and you can put that number in there and now you know how many books that day that book is sold so you’ve got a list of potential ideas talking about Amazon suggestion you can tell if those ideas are doing good because books are selling by using Amazon bestseller Inc and the third thing is just trying to figure out hey can I make a better book, you don’t want to go toe to toe with Guy Kawasaki or you don’t want to try to write a book about you know idea of validation and go toe to toe with Pat Flynn, right? So those are three things but for those of you who want like more quantifiable data you want to be able to see the numbers how many people type something in the Amazon, what are some better ideas, we created a software called KDP rockets and literally you just go into this thing that works in marking PC you can type in your book idea and KDP rocket will give you a giant list of keywords suggestions, it’ll tell you the average amount of money that books are making for that, number of competitors, estimated number of people that type that into Amazon, OK? And then, it also gives you a one to one hundred competition level so now you can quickly say, ‘hey this book idea has a high demand it has low competition and the people are paying money for it’ so now you have a good idea on where to start.

Zach: Awesome, So for those of you who just real quick recap, you can find that at KDP which is Kindle Direct Publishing calculator that’s going to come up in Google and the website will come right up but you know me, we’ve discussed about this so many times guys the difference between free and paid easy huge dramatic difference. Free is there for you to get the ideas to get something on paper and outline but when you’re ready to start making money in you’re actually serious about this, do get KDP rocket, I actually personally use it, I have software user, she has been rocking with some of the books that she’s released in there and we do we’ll see case studies like this so I know personally that the software I’ve been inside of it I may even make some training videos now about it and just so awesome, I couldn’t even like fathom anything without that I have seen inside that tells you you know hey ‘this is going to if you get paid to wind you do top sales you’re going to make this much is what top sellers are making. And I’ve never been able to quantify that, I’ve never seen how much money is inside Amazon books and inside Amazon Kindle it would blow your mind but once you get inside KDP rocket you do see that, don’t you?

Dave: Yeah absolutely and when we created the software we made it so that it is so intuitive and easy to use we are better testers range from fourteen years old to seventy years old from novice computer, the files are in the computer to like you know hey I know how to program this count off and we found the best way to make sure that it’s just easy to digest and just kind of roll through.

Zach: Awesome! So with that guys I’m going to be quickly putting this up here again you can get the KDP rocket here Zach dash Miller dot com (Zach-miller.com//davedas-chesson ) forward slash Dave Das dash Chesson, you can also go to kindle preorder dot com (kindlepreorder.com) look up see all of David’s awesome stuff but I don’t want to leave you just yet Dave you had so much amazing information I think we’re going to keep you for a couple more minutes I just want to ask you a couple last questions, you mind?

Dave: Yeah, no problem, absolutely.

Zach: Awesome, the one thing that I always get from everyone no matter what they start no matter what they ask me about they always want to know when I start this what’s the number one reason that probably going to fail, so I can mentally prepare myself for it.

Dave: Well, the big thing that I always find with authors is that a they just have this book inside of them and they don’t they don’t plan right so you know the process we just talked about is about how to you know get your book to shop more in Amazon right, how to figure out the market. Now here’s the thing if you use KDP rocket, use the process we just talked about and you’re finding that if there are nobody’s buying books on that or there’s no market for it or the competition is way too great that doesn’t mean you can’t write the book but what it does mean is that you cannot depend on Amazon to sell the book for you. Now you’ve got to go to that other type of marketing we talked about which is finding the market grabbing them and bringing them to your book or having that large e-mail list that you can tap into to then kick start it and get the book going on the Amazon engine right. So with that there are a lot of people that just write a book and hope that it’s going to work hope that there’s a market and they find out no there’s not, all right or they just don’t plan at all the one thing I tell authors is that the day you decide to start writing a book is the day you start marketing the book, that’s another big issue people run into. They go to hit publish and they’re like great “OK nothing’s happening, OK maybe I should do something, what do I do?” And then you’re like Ah you’ve missed it like a book launch should be like this big momentous wave a tidal wave the hit and you ride and you you know you keep bolstering it and all of a sudden it just takes off like. So to recap that, one, you know check to make sure there’s a market for it if there’s not, prepare to market your book from externally and bringing people to it and then two, make sure you start marketing the day you start writing so that you have a legitimate launch plan.

Zach: Awesome, I don’t think much more can be said, that was perfect. Everyone, Dave thank you for coming and being on and sharing your amazing information with us, so that we can be more successful on Amazon.

Dave: Hey! No problem and thank you for having me.

Zach: So well talk to you here soon again.

Author: Zach Miller

Hi, my name is Zach. I want to welcome you to my marketing laboratory. Yeah I know, it kinda looks like a blog, but there’s a reason for that.

So you’ve heard a little bit about me (hopefully all good), and you want to learn why I’m ‘the guy to follow’. And I don’t blame ya, I don’t follow a man till I know where he’s headin’ too.

So, who am I to tell you all these marketing marvels & secrets? Well, let me tell you I’m no genius – I’m actually a college drop out! But even with sub-par collegiate skills, I’ve made myself and others millions online.